Читать книгу False to Any Man - Leslie Ford - Страница 11

We stepped from the dark street into a warm softly-lighted room all white and cherry-red and turquoise blue. It was gay and lovely, but so enormous that it took my breath away. For an instant I stood completely bewildered. Then I understood. The whole of one side and the entire end of the carriage house were one immense sheet of beautiful mirror glass, so that the small room with its cleverly concealed lighting looked twice as long and twice as wide as it actually was. The image of one side of the room, with its two windows draped in an Empire turquoise blue chintz with magenta flowers on a yellow stripe, and its pair of deep cherry red love seats, perfectly balanced the real side; the long glass-legged table against the mirrored wall was only half a table made whole by its own reflection. The floor was completely covered with the palest eggshell carpet, the chairs were chromium with white leather seats and backs. The garden end of the room was only the reflection of the entrance door and the two narrow chintz-draped windows full of flowers. It sounds fantastic, and it was actually exquisite and completely convincing.

Karen Lunt, her shining hair piled in a coronet of corn-colored curls, ravishingly slim in a black velvet frock that entirely covered her until she turned her totally bare back, came forward to meet us.

“It’s done with mirrors!” she laughed gaily. “Don’t you love it?”

“It’s enchanting!” I cried.

She dropped my hand. “Jerry!” She kissed her affectionately on the cheek. “Darling, you don’t look a bit well. It’s so sweet of you to come when you’d probably much rather be in bed. Hello, Sandy. Oh, here’s Roger! We’ve been out of our minds—I told everybody you were coming!—See?”

She took Roger Doyle’s arm in both hands and pulled him forward.

“Look, everybody! He’s really not horrid at all, he has a beautiful soul! Jerry, do take Mrs. Latham upstairs.”

We went up through a gay barrage of greeting. I knew everybody there, it seemed, except the handsome young man pouring a cocktail out of an enormous crystal shaker for Philander Doyle. “It’s an odd gathering,” I thought as I followed Jeremy up a tiny real staircase panelled in mirrors. There was one nationally syndicated columnist, a Northern senator and his charming wife, a woman whose name one constantly heard connected with all sorts of political intrigue and whose father had once been a power in the diplomatic game, the Doyles, the Candlers, myself and the young man with the cocktail shaker. As we reached the second floor I saw Miss Isabel Doyle emerge from what I suppose was the kitchen—she was licking her lips, anyway. She had on a fantastic violet lace gown studded with purple velvet bows that would have looked divine on an Edwardian debutante.

“Did I hear my dear brother?” she was asking, in that odd Vague manner of hers, and everybody broke into gales of laughter, especially Philander Doyle.

Jerry looked at me. She was perilously near tears.

“Buck up, my sweet—it’s just beginning,” I said. I laid my wrap across a glamorous shell-pink ivory satin divan. It was a practical enough bed, I suppose, fundamentally. I looked around at the mirrored walls, and at the tiny shell-pink bathroom beyond. Except for it there was nothing, really, to indicate a bedroom.

“It seems funny that . . . that this is the hayloft where the rats used to eat March Wind’s oats, doesn’t it?” Jerry said, with a strangled attempt to laugh. Suddenly she buried her head against my shoulder. “Oh, don’t let me be a fool tonight, will you, Grace!”

She broke away quickly and patted at her eyes with the puff I handed her from my vanity. “Ready?” she asked, and we went down stairs.

“You know everybody but Geoffrey, don’t you, Mrs. Latham?—This is Geoffrey McClure.”

Geoffrey McClure bowed and handed me a beautiful dry Martini. “How do you do, Mrs. Latham?” he said. Somehow, even when he spoke he seemed to be looking at Karen; in fact, he hardly took his eyes off her at any time, and in a room that was mostly mirrors that was almost embarrassingly magnified. Nobody, however, seemed concerned about it, except Miss Isabel Doyle. When we were settled in various spots with enormous white and gold plates of country ham and fat broiled oysters, with crisp browned sweet potato balls, and celery braised with almonds and beaten biscuit, she was beside me.

“Mr. McClure is an unusually attractive man, isn’t he, my dear?”

I glanced at Mr. McClure. His blond rather wavy hair, his Bond Street dinner jacket, his blue Nordic eyes and little blond mustache, made Sandy, who was visible in the mirror beside him, look like nothing holy.

“Very, I should say.”

“Should you say he was interested in Karen?” Miss Isabel inquired. I don’t see how he could have helped hearing her.

I laughed.

“I do hope Roger isn’t jealous,” she said. “My dear, you wouldn’t believe it, but Roger has the most abominable temper. He’s not a bit like my dear brother—his father, you know.”

I nodded.

“I’m sure Karen will make him a perfect wife,” she went on. That was fortunately drowned in a burst of laughter from the group that surrounded Philander Doyle. Judge Candler and the Senator glanced over from the other end of the room.

“I was just saying, Senator, that it’s the Judge who ought to live in a glass house, not Karen. Inviolable integrity is wasted in a woman.”

It didn’t really sound funny enough for the peal of laughter it had brought forth. Somebody remarked that fortunately Judge Candler never threw stones, and Miss Isabel said, “You know, my dear brother has always been opposed to Roger’s passion for Karen. Isn’t it too marvellous he’s finally consented? I’ve been so afraid Roger would simply drift into a marriage with Jeremy.”

I looked at her, rather more savagely than I’d intended, I suppose.

“Oh, my dear, don’t misunderstand me. Jerry’s a lovely child, but I mean . . . really, they’re so like brother and sister.”

I glanced at the two of them, seated as far apart as the constricted actual space allowed. Jerry was very lovely, talking to the Senator’s wife, and Roger Doyle was being distressingly aloof, his eyes, like Geoffrey McClure’s, following his hostess from one small group to the other. When she came at last to Jerry and perched on the fragile arm of her chair, I saw Jerry stiffen for an instant. Then I heard her say, in her beautiful bell-clear voice, so that everyone in the room could hear:

“Karen, the bank is turning all your aircraft stock over to you in the morning, with all the back dividends.”

Karen’s voice pealed out joyously. “Darling! Aren’t you wonderful!”

“It’s Dad, not me. He couldn’t bear to think of your starving in this appalling squalor!”

If there was anything but the utmost and most engaging friendliness in any of that, it certainly wasn’t apparent to the naked ear. If it hadn’t been that Miss Isabel dropped her fork on the pale soft rug, the infinitesimal silence that met it would hardly have been noticeable at all. In the rush of male helpers I glanced in the mirror at Roger Doyle. His face had darkened alarmingly. Geoffrey McClure glanced very casually at Karen and away, and the moment was over. A kind of too gay tension had suddenly relaxed, and for the next hour a group, civilized and au courant in the affairs of the world, chatted pleasantly.

In my sudden jerk forward to catch the sweet potato ball that lodged in one of Miss Isabel’s purple bows I’d wrecked a shoulder strap. When the first guest rose to depart and there was the usual instant following of everybody who had to get back to town, I slipped upstairs to the shell-pink bathroom. But Karen’s house had nothing visible that held anything as utilitarian as a pin, and before I had the strap anchored it was too late. Outside the door I could hear the clipped Oxford speech of Geoffrey McClure.

“But it’s dishonorable, Karen, don’t you see? That sort of thing isn’t done.”

I could hear her soft voice, but not her words. And then his answer:

“Oh my dear, I love you too—madly, insanely—but we can’t, not that way. It would ruin everything—my family, our future. No, my dearest, I’d rather be dead—I’d rather see you dead.”

There was a pause then with the passionate undercurrent of Karen’s voice, and Geoffrey McClure’s again:

”No, you shan’t. It isn’t cricket, old girl—it just isn’t.”

I waited—and after a long, long time I peeked out. The gay little room was empty. From downstairs I could hear Karen’s voice, too high and too bright. I slipped down unnoticed—I hoped; certainly by Karen, who was saying goodbye at the door to Geoffrey McClure. Judge Candler and the Washingtonians had gone; only the Doyles and Jerry and Sandy were still there. Karen came back from the door.

“You haven’t seen my house, have you, Mrs. Latham? Not the business end, anyway.”

She took my arm. “This is the kitchen.”

She pushed a crystal rosette, a glass panel slid smoothly to one side.

“I’m frightfully proud of it, it’s my own idea. Oilburner, hot water.” She waved at the small green oil heating unit and the gas hot water coil and storage tank compactly installed above it. The pilot light was a pencil point of blue flame at the bottom.

“Aren’t they wonderful? I’m one of those people they advertise about—you know, that buy their fittings at a junk shop and call in the plumber to put them in. Only I didn’t buy them, a friend who’s modernizing gave them to me instead of the junk man, and I got another friend to install them. He says they’re obsolete, but they work. Not the oil burner, it’s the latest. I mean the rest of them. You’d be surprised if you knew how little it cost.—Here are the cupboards.”

She displayed stacks of neatly arranged dishes, all washed and put away.

“Jerry loaned me William, and Miss Isabel sent her maid over,” she went on.

I looked at her. She was chattering like a magpie, but her heart was not in it.

“Oh, here’s my tonic,” she said. She picked up a glass of milk from a silver tray on the neat little metal sink and drank it, making a charming face, and put it down again, smiling brighty.

“It’s all marvellous,” I said.

We went back into the white room. The others had gone upstairs for their wraps; I could hear them talking and laughing. Then I heard another and quite different sound, closer by, a definite and very plaintive “Meow, meow!” I turned around. Karen broke into a peal of laughter.

“Come in, Mrs. Harris,” she called.

A small Siamese cat of a lovely café-au-lait shade stalked in from the kitchen, rubbing her back against the panel edge, purring heavily.

“I had to hide her tonight,” Karen said. “Miss Isabel hates cats. Come to Karen, beautiful.”

She picked the cat up just as everybody came down the narrow stairs of the old hay loft and pressed her face against its head. It struggled out of her arms, jumped down and made a dash for the kitchen, and just in time too. Miss Isabel said, “I thought I heard a cat.”

“No, indeed,” Karen laughed. She opened the front door.

Miss Isabel peered into the kitchen.

“Karen, it is a cat!”

I could hear her poking around among the pots and pans. Suddenly she gave a wild screech and flew back into the room, pulling at the glass panel. Mrs. Harris, even more terrified, made a leap for the narrow opening and streaked, hair on end, through the room, practically upsetting Philander Doyle, and out into the night. Miss Isabel Doyle leaned against the half-closed panel, her bloodstream pounding in the veins of her thin throat.

“You know, I’m terrified of cats,” she gasped, looking at her brother as if it were his fault, not Karen’s. “I do hope it won’t go over to our house.”

“It won’t,” Karen laughed. “Good night, everybody!”

She stood in the doorway for a while as we went out, calling “Kitty, kitty!” and finally closed the door.

“I’ll phone for a cab from your house, Jerry,” I said. Then I noticed that Roger Doyle was still with us. Jerry and Sandy—who’d been quieter all evening than I’d ever seen him—moved ahead. Roger walked with me.

At the steps Jerry turned.

“Good night, Roger,” she said quietly. “We won’t ask you in, it’s so awfully late.”

Roger Doyle stopped abruptly with one foot on the step.

“Oh, of course,” he said stiffly. “Good night. Good night, Sandy.”

I hoped my own too cheery good night covered Sandy’s silence. He opened the door. I heard Roger’s retreating steps crunch the dry snow.

“You shouldn’t have done that,” I said when we got inside.

Neither of them spoke for a minute. Then Jerry said, “Stay all night, Grace. It really is late. Lilac can bring you something in the morning.”

I hesitated, and then, perhaps because some primitive instinct stirred inside me, perhaps only because it was the easiest thing to do, I said, “All right, if it isn’t a lot of trouble.”

“Just be careful not to wake Dad when you go up, is all,” Jerry said. She glanced at her brother.

“I’m turning in,” he said. “Hurry up.”

He stood with his forefinger on the switch. I noticed then something I’d been vaguely unaware of all evening. He had at last taken the hand with the taped knuckles out of the pocket of his dinner jacket.

“Scram, pals,” he said.

Then at last, when Jerry had said good night, I lay slowly overcoming the frigid linen sheets. Neither of us had mentioned Karen or her party, absorbed, it would seem, in the mechanics of my staying all night—as if I’d never borrowed a pair of outing flannel pajamas before or Jerry hadn’t spent half her life coping with unexpected guests. There was no visible sign of what the pale enigmatic mask of her face concealed. No one else would have guessed that the subdued fire in her dark gold-flecked eyes was dying ember, on her heart’s altar, of a sacrifice that made the suet and raisins she’d offered up to the birds on the snow so pitifully inadequate.